Chapter 51: Tanga Port

Chapter 51: Tanga Port

December 14, 1866 – Tanga Region

Under the scorching sun, East African colonial officials wearing straw hats were using whips to supervise native workers on the construction site.

The natives, in groups of four, were carrying large stones with their bare hands and slowly stacking them along the shore.

Immigrants were using wheelbarrows to transport sand and cement to the shore, adding water and mixing it to fill the gaps between the stones.

This was the construction site of a new dock, built entirely of stone, with the stones carefully polished, flat, and solid.

Not far away, immigrants and natives were using shovels and pickaxes to expand the bay along the coastline. Thousands of people were working at the same time, creating a grand and impressive scene.

This construction site was located in what is now the city of Tanga in Tanzania, and the port under construction was the future Tanga Port.

Historically, Tanga Port became a military port under German East Africa in 1889. After Tanzania's independence, it became the northernmost seaport in the country, the second largest in the nation, and a center for sisal processing and trade.

At present, this land was being leased by the East African colony from the Sultanate of Zanzibar, to build a port for its own use.

Before this, it had been nothing more than a desolate bay under Zanzibar's rule.

Tanga Port faces the Tanga Bay to the east. The coastline is winding, with many natural harbors. The average water depth is 17 meters. To the east, Pemba Island acts as a barrier, protecting the sea from large winds and waves.

From December to February, southeast winds blow in the Tanga region; from April to October, southwest winds prevail. The average highest temperature in January is 32°C, and the average lowest in July is 20°C. There is little fog throughout the year, with wide visibility across the sea.

Tanga Port is about 120 kilometers in a straight line from Manda Town, the nearest settlement in the Upper Coastal Area, making it the colony's newest northern stronghold in that zone.

The reason for choosing this location was not only its natural suitability for a port, but also the strategic plan for the colony to start expanding into Kenya next year.

Currently, the East African colony had more or less gained control over the Tanganyika region. Especially the important transportation hubs and fertile areas with abundant water had been brought under colonial control.

However, Tanganyika was vast, and many native tribes still lived between the colonial settlements. At this time, the colony didn't have the capacity to remove all these natives.

There weren't enough places to relocate them. The best method was to sell them to merchants from the Sultanate of Zanzibar. Another option was to use them for labor in some of the colony's infrastructure projects.

But these solutions were far from enough. The demand for slaves among Arab traders was limited, and ever since the colony had begun expanding inland, large numbers of natives had already been sent to Zanzibar, oversaturating the market.

Even now, slave prices remained low. What had once been a highly profitable industry was now relying on low profit and high volume to survive.

Since the Arab traders couldn't absorb more, the colony had to figure out another way to deal with these natives.

Due to a shortage of ships, most vessels were being used to transport immigrants, and there was no way to send these natives overseas.

So the East African colony could only forcibly expel some of the native tribes. Even so, it still had a large reserve of native laborers.

Because of this, the colony began using them for large-scale projects—in addition to clearing farmland, building roads, and digging irrigation canals.

The biggest project this year was the construction of Tanga Port, as well as the road connecting the port to Manda Town in the Upper Coastal Area, both of which used a large amount of native labor.

With extensive use of native prisoners, Tanga Port had started to take shape. The docks and warehouses were already built, and a 17-meter-high lighthouse had also been erected.

As the future key port for the colony's imports and exports, Ernst had imported a batch of cannons from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These were shipped from Trieste, passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and along the African coast, and were unloaded at Dar es Salaam.

They were then dragged by manpower and animal power to Tanga, where they were used to set up defensive batteries on the north and south sides of the port.

While building the port, Ernst also founded the colony's first factory: a sisal processing plant.

He had specially imported a batch of decorticators (machines to strip the sisal) from France, and had them assembled in East Africa.

Sisal was currently a major profitable product of the colony. To further increase its value, the goal was to stop exporting raw sisal and instead export finished and semi-finished products.

The sisal factory sorted and processed the colony's harvested sisal, putting it through crushing, residue removal, washing, and drying. Then workers would straighten, comb, and align the fibers, followed by spinning and weaving.

The final products were ropes and canvas, along with semi-processed fiber materials.

Sisal is a coarse fiber and not suitable for fabric, but it is dense, tough, salt-alkali resistant, and not easily corroded by seawater. Before synthetic fibers were invented, sisal was the best material for ship ropes.

It was also widely used for fishing nets, canvas, mining cables, all kinds of ropes and sacks, and even as raw material for high-grade paper such as nautical charts and banknotes.

So sisal had no problem finding buyers. It was also grown in other parts of the world—Brazil and Southeast Asia had relatively large-scale cultivation.

Having the sisal factory at Tanga Port would help East African sisal gain competitiveness in the global market.

Sisal is a drought-resistant and low-maintenance crop, and East Africa's climate was ideal for its cultivation. Once planted, farmers hardly needed to care for it.

Labor costs in the colony were very low, and with the help of machines, the cost of producing sisal fiber was extremely cheap.

Currently, all the factory workers were immigrants. The factory had three workshops, all located near Tanga Port.

With the machines roaring, workers fed neatly stacked sisal leaves into the machines. The rollers crushed and separated the leaves.

Workers wound the sisal fibers into bundles with wooden sticks, rinsed them in pots, dried them, and finally straightened the fibers by hand to make rope—or sent them to the next factory to be turned into canvas.

Finished and semi-finished sisal products were exported overseas directly from Tanga Port, carried by either the colony's own merchant ships or passing Portuguese and Dutch ships, and sold in Europe.

Tanga Port had already become a center for both processing and trading sisal. Other colonial specialty products—like cloves, pyrethrum, and cinchona bark—could also be exported from Tanga.

At the same time, the colony's needed supplies could be shipped in through the port, especially for next year's expansion into Kenya.

From Tanga Port, it wasn't far north to the Kenyan border. Immigrants shipped from overseas could disembark directly at Tanga, and after being assigned, could be sent straight to various parts of Kenya.

This would save a lot of manpower and resources compared to disembarking at Dar es Salaam.

Of course, immigrants for developing Tanzania would still land at Dar es Salaam to fill in the colonial gaps within Tanzania, while those heading to Kenya would arrive through Tanga Port.

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